


Wreck

by SpoonerizeSwiftness (SplickedyHat)



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Car Accidents, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 20:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7453648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/SpoonerizeSwiftness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yeah, it's...been a couple years.”  Two years, eleven months and three days.  But who’s counting, right?<br/>“You, uh…” Mike’s eyes flick up and down—away.  “You look good.”<br/><em>Anybody looks good if last time you saw them they were covered in blood with pieces of your windshield in their face</em>, Chuck doesn’t say.<br/>--<br/>Two kids, emotional fallout and an unplanned reunion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wreck

**Author's Note:**

> Estrange: cause (someone) to be no longer close or affectionate to someone; alienate  
> Cataclysm: a sudden violent upheaval  
> Anticlimactic: lacking climax, disappointing or ironically insignificant following of impressive foreshadowing.

The dorm room door is open, but nobody ever comes to Chuck’s room so at first the knock doesn’t register.  He’s got an exam in a couple of days, and he’s got his nose almost touching the page of his advanced comp sci textbook when the knocking comes again, a little bit louder, jolting him upright.

“Sorry!”  He says, and snaps his book shut, squinting at the figure silhouetted against the light from the hallway.  “I…oh.”

Mike Chilton is almost the same as Chuck remembers, with the major difference that he’s _even more._   More… _everything_.  Taller, broader-shouldered, darker-skinned, more muscular and even more white-toothed and charming than he was in college.  More handsome than he was before…the accident.  There’s always been a kind of unquenchable vitality to Mike.  He almost doesn’t seem like he should fit in the cramped walls of the dorm room. 

The sight of that warm, slightly cautious grin makes a weird combination of fear and pain clash with warm affection in Chuck’s chest.  The scars on his arms and side and cheek throb.  He abruptly reaches up to his hair, pulled back out of his way to study, and unties it to let it fall in front of his eyes again.  It helps, just a little.

“…hey,” says Mike, and ducks his head a little, almost self-consciously.  “Been a while, huh?”

“Yeah.”  His voice shakes just a little—he clears his throat and tries again, steady this time.  “…yeah.  Couple years.”  _Two years, eleven months and three days.  But who’s counting, right?_

“You, uh…” Mike’s eyes flick up and down—away.  His brown cheeks are just a little bit pink.  The pain fights again with the breathless, stupid attraction.  Chuck feels abruptly sick.  “You look good.”

 _Anybody looks good if last time you saw them they were covered in blood with pieces of your windshield in their face,_ Chuck doesn’t say. 

“So do you,” he says instead.  It’s not enough, it really doesn’t even start to cover it, but it makes Mike smile sheepishly.  _Hit him,_ says the part of Chuck that’s been practicing the rant, writing it down in the backs of notebooks and on napkins in the campus café.  _Yell at him, you know what to say_ , where the _fuck_ have you been, how could you think it was okay to just drop us and leave like that, _you’ve gone over this so many times in your head—_ but all he says is “…so, you, uh…you on break?”

Mike opens his mouth and then stops and closes it again on whatever he’d been about to say.  When he does manage to speak, his voice is very, very even.

“D—Kane kicked me out.”

Chuck gapes.  “I— _what_?”

“Kane threw me out.”  Mike repeats, bitter and hard.  “Whatever.  I’m done with him.”

“Why?”  Mike loves his dad with an intensity and loyalty most people reserve for a general, a commander, a respected leader.  The whole time Mike and Chuck were friends he followed his dad’s rules to the letter, got amazing grades, never back-talked, never disappointed.  And Abraham Kane made no secret of the fact that Mike was a perfect son, that he was so, so proud.  Mike always lived on the pedestal.

He looks tired now.  Worn down.  The pedestal is crumbled.

“He’s…” Mike’s hands work at his sides.  “—I don’t want to get you in trouble.  I—I shouldn’t have come back here.”

He turns his back, walking fast and sharp toward the door, and Chuck, before he can even think about stopping himself, reaches out and snags one of his sleeves.

“Mikey.”

Mike freezes dead in his tracks.  Chuck can’t see his face, but the sudden tension in his shoulders is clear.  Chuck hasn’t said that name in years.  It feels good.  The scars ache.

“What are you talking about.”

Mike takes a breath, _Mike_ takes a breath, and it shakes.  It trembles like his shoulders do.

“…I can’t,” he says, and his voice is wretched, pained.  “—I can’t, Chuck, you’re—I can’t.  Not you.  God, I’m such an idiot, I shouldn’t have come—”

“ _Mike._ ”

“Sorry—I’m sorry.”

The words cut like a knife.  Chuck winces back from them, letting go as Mike turns back to him, eyes wide and earnest and so _genuine_. 

“I’m so sorry,” Mike says again, like he’s been aching to say it for _so long_ and this isn’t about his dad any more.  It’s a cold Tuesday in the middle of the year, and everything is backwards and painful and this should be on a holiday or something, on the anniversary, on some… _significant_ day but it’s just Mike, standing in Chuck’s dorm room on a random day, orphaned again.  Apologizing.

Chuck opens his mouth to answer and chokes on whatever he’d been about to say.  Words refuse to come.  Mike looks back at him, and for a second Chuck remembers those wide, worried eyes as he tried to breathe and tasted blood, the ragged voice gasping out _no oh no—Chuck, can you hear me?  Oh god—_

“Are you in trouble?” he says, because apparently he hates his own mental health.  One half of his brain wants to ask Mike to leave him alone again— _probably the half that wasn’t smashed against the inside of your skull_ , that nasty little voice whispers in the back of his head _._   The other half remembers what it was like to lose his only family; once as a kid, once when Mike backed away and ran from his hospital room.  How it felt to suddenly know that the people who were closest to you are gone.

But here’s Mike, back again. 

“I know you said you never wanted to see me again,” says Mike instead of answering the question.  “I didn’t—know where else to go.  I don’t know where the others—” he takes a deep breath—his voice keeps getting out of control, starting to waver and crack.  “—I-I’m not gonna show up when you don’t want me and—this was an awful idea.  I’m sorry.  I’m really sorry.”

“All I said was you should give me _time_ ,” says Chuck, slightly stung.  “You’re the one who vanished for three years, dude!”

“But—you said—” Mike rakes a hand through his hair.  “—dad—I mean—Kane—”  His face spasms in pain at the slip—for a second, Chuck thinks he sees tears in his eyes and his heart does an agonizing double-beat in his chest.  “—he told me you said…”

Mike’s dad never liked his friends.  _You’re no_ scholarship orphan _now, you’re my heir!  You’ve got to start thinking about_ appearances _!_   It was the only thing Mike ever outright disobeyed his father over.

Things are slowly starting to drift into a new shape.  It’s hard to breathe. 

“…I never wanted you to go,” says Chuck, and Mike slowly backs up until his knees hit the side of the bed.  He lets them fold, slides down to sit on the floor by the bed and buries his face in his hands.  “I never said that.” Mike shakes his head, slow and steady, aimless denial.  “Mike, he didn’t want you around us anymore—”

“ _He said you yelled at him,_ ” Mike says into his hands, muffled and barely audible.  “… _I knew you wouldn’t do that, I knew—but you told me to go, I thought—”_

“That’s because you love finding reasons to hate yourself,” says Chuck, sharper and more bitter than he means to, and Mike flinches from the words like they’re a blow.  “—that’s why I asked you to leave the first time, because it wasn’t all your fault and you wouldn’t stop tearing yourself up over it but I didn’t have energy to argue with you!”

“It _was_ my fault!”  Mike says, sudden and loud, “—I was driving, it was _my fault_!”

“Oh, so you _asked_ that crazy asshole to slam you?” He’s spent so long, _too_ long, being angry, and it comes out in acidic sarcasm.  Mike winces again, staring.  “Well yeah, if you wanted him to swing into your lane and push you off the side of the road, it was _totally_ your fault.”

“What?”

“The— _dipshit_ in the bright red car?  The one that hit us and then _kept going_ like a—” Chuck stops, breathing through his nose, and then finishes, “—that guy?  He was in your blind spot and then he knocked your back bumper and pushed you off the shoulder.”

Mike’s face goes ashen.

“There was a—somebody _hit_ us?”

“Unless the concussion fucked me up more than I thought, yeah,” says Chuck, and that bitterness is back again.  Mike flinches from it, crumples away from the humorless laugh like ice under boiling water, sinks in on himself.  He looks so tired.

“… _I’m sorry,_ ” he says again, very very small, and Chuck thinks about Kane and lets himself soften a little, breathing the pain away.  His cheek won’t stop aching, fierce and slow.  The glass eye feels foreign and cold all of a sudden. 

Chuck never liked Abraham Kane, but he always envied the way Mike talked about him, looked up to him—like they really were father and son.  Losing that all over again… _having_ a family and then losing it…

He comes down off his chair carefully, easing his leg down first and then following it with the rest of him.  Moving it after studying for so long makes his hip throb, but he did his stretches this morning at least and he even manages to hide the flinch.  It doesn’t matter; Mike’s not looking at him as he settles down on the floor by the bed, not too close, leaving a guilty, uneasy space between them.

“…me too,” he says, and reaches out carefully to put a hand on Mike’s shoulder.  It’s a shock, somehow, when the touch doesn’t burn him, doesn’t hurt.  Mike’s shoulder is warm and damp from the drizzle outside, and it’s awful the way it feels like something sliding back into place inside his chest.  “What happened?”

Mike picks at his hair, trains his eyes on his knees and doesn’t look up.  He leans into the hand on his shoulder, though, leans into it with a kind of tense desperation of somebody who hasn’t been touched in way too long. 

“ _…he wanted me to do something,_ ” he says quietly.

“What?” 

Mike shakes his head slowly, and the words he said when he first arrived seem to echo in the back of Chuck’s head.  _I don’t want to get you in trouble._

“It was everything,” he says instead, and taps his fingers on his knees.  “It was…y’know, it was his stupid curfew and the way he treated the lady who cleaned the carpets and how he kept Jules locked up in her room studying all the time.  And…” he chews on his lip, and then breathes out hard through his nose and pulls out his phone.  “…and every time I started trying to ‘ _talk back to him’_ he’d…send me these again.”

There are photos.  Chuck lying in an ambulance, bloody shirt cut away and right arm mangled, with an oxygen mask over blood-stained lips.  Dutch slumped nearby with a crooked arm cradled in his lap, Julie holding a pad of cloth to her bloody head.  Texas looking ashen and shocked.  (He’d been so upset he was the only one who wasn’t hurt, like they would think he cheated somehow.  Like they would think he could have kept them from getting hurt and he only saved himself.  Seeing Texas crying is somehow one of the most fundamentally awful things ever.) 

“He told me everything,” says Mike hollowly, as Chuck flips through the pictures, staring at his own pale, still face.  There’s a shard of glass in his cheek, slick with blood.  His right eye throbs.  “ _That was_ very irresponsible _, Mike.  I’m disappointed in you_.”  The words have a ring of rote to them, like he’s imitated them to himself before.

“That’s messed up,” says Chuck, and Mike blinks and then stares at him like he wasn’t expecting that.  “Seriously!  At least tell me he stopped doing those… _sparring matches_ or whatever he called them.”

Mike’s eyes wander away from his face again, like he wants to lie but he can’t remember how.  Chuck’s eye twinges again and he rubs at it sharply, cursing under his breath.

“I told you I don’t care what he calls it, if he’s hitting you—”

“He’s not doing anything anymore,” says Mike, and there’s a kind of leaden finality in his voice that says _really_ clearly _stop pushing this._   “I’m never gonna see him again.  Okay?  So it doesn’t matter.”

It still matters, it _definitely_ matters, but he looks miserable and the expression freaks Chuck out enough he doesn’t feel like pushing.  It doesn’t fit on Mike’s face.  He just…shouldn’t look this way. 

“Everybody’s gonna be happy to see you again,” he tries instead.  Mike blinks and looks up at him, brightening.  Then his face falls. 

“…as happy as you were?”

Ow.

“Look,” says Chuck.  “It hurt when you left, okay?”

“I know, I’m—”

“No shut up.  It hurt, so I got mad—everybody else has been trying to tell me you wouldn’t do something like that, ever since you left, but I wouldn’t listen, I was—too dumb to listen, okay?  The others are gonna be happy, I’m just…stupid.”

“I hurt you worse than them.”

Shit, no, _idiot_ , he’s making it about himself again.  _No you hurt everybody_ springs immediately to mind—but he can’t tell him that, what if it makes him make that face again.  Besides, the others all seemed to hold on hope when Mike left, they _weren’t_ hurt the same.  _No you didn’t I’m fine we’re all fine_ is a stupidly, insultingly obvious lie.  Chuck sputters for a second, and then Mike puts a hand on his shoulder, cautious but firm, shutting him up as effectively as a hand over his mouth.

“I shouldn’t have left,” he says.

“Whatever,” says Chuck spasmodically.  It comes out strangled.  Mike’s hand tightens on his shoulder, pulling him up; Mike’s eyes are dark and sharp in the dim light from Chuck’s desk lamp, fixed on Chuck’s face with an intensity that’s almost enough to burn.

“No,” he says.  “Not ‘whatever’.  Chuck, I’m sorry.  You deserve to be mad at me.  _I_ deserve to have you get mad at me.”

“Well—good,” says Chuck.

“Yeah.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes after that.  Chuck didn’t realize how much of a mess his dorm room was becoming until he had somebody else in it—he watches Mike look from the pile of dirty clothes in the corner to the mini-fridge in the corner to the stack of books and papers overflowing from the desk, and resists the urge to jump up (ha, yeah right) and start cleaning. 

“No roommate?”

“He left.”

Mike frowns.  “Why?”

“I’m not exactly great company in a small room for a long time,” Chuck says dryly.  “…sleep schedule from hell, can’t stop mumbling while I code, yell when I get nightmares, any of this ringing any bells?”

“Never bothered me,” says Mike.  Which…is true.  Mike never seemed to have a problem with any of Chuck’s idiosyncrasies, his awful eating habits, his messy room.  “You were a great roommate.”

And that should sound insincere, like he’s buttering Chuck up, but Mike’s expression is nothing but earnest. “We weren’t roommates,” says Chuck, but there’s a smile tugging insistently at the corner of his mouth.  Memories he hasn’t wanted to think about for a long time are resurfacing—climbing on the rooftops of the group home when they were nine, clinging onto Mike’s arm as he laughed.  Mike, eleven years old, pulling some bully off of him and yelling _stoppit you jerk leave him alone!_   “That’s not what—we weren’t roommates.”

They never were.  They were something else, brothers or best friends or partners in crime, _something_.  Mike’s face, hard-edged and tired in the dim light of the desk lamp, softens a little.  He’s obviously remembering the same times, the same years when they were kids.  For a few long seconds they both sit silent, looking ahead at the wall of the dorm room.  Every so often a car goes by in the turnaround outside, and headlights flicker through the window.  It took a long time, but Chuck doesn’t even flinch at them anymore.

“… _I was turned around talking,_ ” he says finally, very, very quietly.  “… _did you even remember that?”_

Mike jumps a little at the sound of his voice.  “Huh?”

“I was talking to Julie and when I tried to turn around my seatbelt locked and I pulled the shoulder-strap off.”  He didn’t make the conscious decision to move, but his hand is on his right arm, rubbing compulsively back and forth past the scars.  Mike is watching his face, he can see out of the corner of his eye, but if he turns around now god knows if he’ll have the guts to keep talking. 

He can still remember every motion—the sharp jerk of the belt slamming into his collarbone as he turned around, laughing at whatever Julie had been saying.  The feeling of Mike’s hand grabbing at his shoulder as he shrugged the belt off just for a second.  Just for a stupid fucking second.  “—you were trying to tell me to put my belt back on, but I kept going _just give me a second_ like a—like—and I saw the guy swerve at us.  Through the window, he was on Julie’s side, He just came outta nowhere and then…”

He can’t finish, but he doesn’t have to.  Mike remembers what happened next.  Probably better than Chuck does—Chuck blacked out in a heavy _CRUNCH_ of breaking glass and surrendering metal, as the world spun and flipped and went dark.  It was Mike that staggered through the wreckage pulling them out, Mike that woke him up and pulled him back into a mess of sirens and blood and nauseating pain.

“Did you see the guy who hit us?”

Chuck shakes his head—sometimes he wonders if the crash blanked that part out, somehow.  If he’s imagining the blank mask of a face.  “…his windshield was tinted really dark.  I just saw…it looked like he was wearing a motorcycle helmet or something.”

Mike’s shoulders tighten abruptly.  Chuck glances over at him, but Mike doesn’t answer the unspoken question, just slowly untenses like he’s forcing himself to, drops his head back against the side of Chuck’s bed.   “…does your arm hurt?” he asks instead.

Chuck almost forgot about the hand rubbing his arm.  It doesn’t really hurt—his arm doesn’t, most of the time, it’s usually just the infrequent sharp aches in his right cheek and eye, the stiff throb of his hip.  “…not really.”

“Nobody beat you up, right?”

It’s been such a long time since that happened, the idea wrings a sort of undignified snort out of Chuck before he can help himself.  “Ha—no!  Come on.”

“So if it’s not that,” Mike pushes, “—why are you sore?”

“I’m not.”  _Busted._   Mike has that look on his face that clearly says _I don’t believe what I’m hearing and I’m gonna get to the bottom of it_.  “I—I’ve just been sitting for too long, okay?  My leg’s going stiff, I just gotta stretch.”

“Your…leg?”

Shit.  Well, he’s not going to get out of talking about it now. 

In the accident, I…broke my hip pretty bad.”  Chuck chews his lip for a second, then admits, “… _really_ bad.”

“What?”  Mike’s eyes widen—he’s going pale again.  “—I didn’t see—”

“Didn’t look as bad as my face, I guess,” says Chuck, and traces the line of the scars down his arm again.  This time when Mike’s eyes flick to his arm, they go wide with realization. 

“Tell me what happened to you,” he says, and there’s a trace of his father in his voice, the sudden snap of command.  “Chuck, tell me what I did.”

“I’m not giving you excuses to beat yourself up.”

“I won’t!”  Mike apparently sees the unconvinced twist to Chuck’s mouth, because he groans, frustrated.  “—I promise, okay?  I swear, I’m not gonna. But I need to know.”

So Chuck shows him.  The pale, fading scars on his upper arm, the surgical scars on his hip where they did their best to piece his leg back together.  The eye.

When he lifts his hair away from his face and turns it up to the light to show the scars, Mike makes a very quiet noise like all the air just left his lungs.  Without the screen of his bangs in the way, the shadows under Mike’s eyes are even clearer, and they stare at each other in silence for a minute, taking each other in. 

“…I figured—” Mike starts finally, breathlessly, “—I-I thought—there was blood everywhere, I couldn’t see if the glass …”

It’s not a very nice thing to do, but Mike’s reaction when Chuck reaches up and pulls the glass eye out is almost funny.  His mouth drops open, his eyes go round and he makes a strangled noise that might be a choked-off curse.  Chuck holds up the glass and angles it a little in the light, watching it flash.  He didn’t go for a perfect match—they might pass in the dark, but the fake is electric blue, closer to neon than the murky seawater-blue-green of the other one.  When he holds it out between them Mike leans away, still bug-eyed.

“Kinda cool, right?”  Chuck reaches up and slides the hollow shell of glass back into place, blinking a couple of times and turning his head to let the fake iris catch the light and flash neon blue-white.  “I’ve got one for LARPing that’s kinda yellow and orange with snake pupils and I tell everybody I stole it from a dragon.” 

That wrings a laugh out of Mike, sudden and almost choked, like it was surprised out of him.  Chuck laughs too, more from the relieved tension than anything, and Mike—

It’s not really intentional or coordinated enough to be a hug—he reaches out, hesitates like he’s not sure if he’s allowed or not, then twists awkwardly to wrap an arm around Chuck’s abruptly-motionless shoulders and pulls him in.  His hair is still damp from the rain outside, and he smells like wet leather and sweat but it doesn’t matter.  Chuck pushes himself up, ignores the pang of pain from his leg and hugs him back, grabbing handfuls of Mike’s wet jacket like he might try to pull away and run again. 

Mike relaxes so abruptly and so completely he almost topples both of them over, leaning into the touch and squeezing so tight it’s hard to breathe, burying his face in Chuck’s shoulder.  “ _I missed you,_ ” he says, and the honest, quiet simplicity of the words is somehow more painful than anything.  “ _I missed you, dude._ ”

“We missed you too,” says Chuck, like those words are in any way adequate for what’s going on in his chest right now, this awful kind of razor-edged warmth.  Mike takes a breath and it shudders like he’s gonna—like he’s…

That’s not okay, so Chuck squeezes him tighter, but that just makes Mike tense up and take more shaking breaths, one after another, dragging in and out.  He’s not…crying.  Not really _crying,_ just holding on tight and shaking and breathing in and out like every breath is a struggle. 

When Mike finally pulls away again his eyes are too bright but there’s no tears on his cheeks.  He drags his hands over his face, lets out a last long, shaking exhale and sits back.

“…Your leg hurts,” he says—an observation, not a question.  Chuck, who was just settling back and trying really hard not to show any signs of pain, groans and gives up, keeling over backwards onto the floor, wincing as his cramped muscles slowly untense in little aching jolts.  “You said you’ve got stretches, right?”

“ _I don’t wanna stretch._ ”

“Yeah, but you’ll feel better if you do.”

He will, and now that Mike’s here he’s not getting out of it any more.  Chuck groans again, starts to sit up and then stops as an idea occurs to him. 

“…I’ll stretch when we get there,” he says, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. 

“Get where, dude?”

“Get…” Chuck trails off, distracted, typing.  “…yeah.  Before dinner.  I’ll have time.”

“Dinner?”  Mike sounds hopeful. 

“Yeah, dinner.  At Dutch’s house,” says Chuck, and hits “send” before he can think about it.  “We meet up there all the time, it’s right in the middle of everybody’s apartments.  Pack up, dude.”

Mike’s mouth drops open.  “ _What_?  Chuck—no, none of them want to see me—”

“Dude, they’ve been hoping you would come back ever since you left.”

“But you didn’t—”

“Pretty sure we covered this, Mikey, I’m the only _asshole_ who was mad at you.”  The reminder of his own bitter, knee-jerk reaction when Mike came back makes his gut twist up, and the words come out sharper than he means them to—he feels shame seize at his spine before the words are even done coming out of his mouth, before he even sees Mike’s pained expression.  “—sorry.  Sorry, dude.  But, uh…no, I’m the only one who was f—who was messed up about it.  Everybody’s gonna freak out, seriously.  We missed you.”

“Okay.”  Mike takes a deep breath.  It’s so strange to see him…nervous, out of his depth.  He straightens his jacket and rakes his fingers through his bangs—his hair is longer than it was in high school, and he’s got bigger circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t been taking care of himself.  “Okay, okay.”

“But!  _But._   When we get there, you’ve got a lot you need to tell us.”  He pushes his hair back so Mike can see he’s serious—but maybe he doesn’t need to.  He forgot how Mike could always read him the way nobody else ever seems to.  “—about your—about Kane.  About everything that happened to you.  We’ve been going nuts not knowing.”

Mike holds his eyes for a second, rebelliously impassive, and then relents and slumps again, rubbing the back of his neck like a tired old man.  “…that’s fair,” he says quietly.  “You guys deserve to know.”

“Cool.”  Chuck clears his throat and lets his hair fall back into his face.  “Hang on, I’m gonna put in my lucky eye and then we can go.”

“ _Lucky eye_?”  Mike still sounds somewhere between amused and horrified. 

“Yeah, lucky eye.”  It’s the other cool one he wears for LARPing sometimes—instead of dragon-yellow with a slit pupil this one is pure white, no iris or pupil at all.  It’s what Chuck always thought being blind _should_ look like, ad what he was half-hoping to see when they finally took the bandages off.  With the scars, it looks downright impressive.  He pulls his hair away again to show Mike when he’s got it in, and Mike looks suitably impressed even though Chuck can tell the whole “glass eye” thing still kinda freaks him out.  “Okay, let’s go.”

“How far is it?”  Mike pulls his phone out, glancing at the time—yeah, it’s getting kinda late.  Good thing Dutch and Julie have late classes, so they’re pretty used to putting out dinner after dark.  “I mean…I kinda walked here.”

Maybe Chuck’s not the only one who’s been wincing every time a car goes past the window.  It’s weirdly painful, though, to think about _Mike_ not wanting to drive.  Mike _loves_ driving, never passed up a chance to get on the road.  Preferably a highway or some backroad where he could go as fast as he wanted and hang his arm out the window to feel the breeze.  It never even occurred to Chuck, in the years between the accident and this nondescript Tuesday night, that Mike wouldn’t still be out there driving too fast with some other group of friends who didn’t yell whenever he took a turn too fast. 

“What happened to Mutt?”

Mike shrugs.  “Jacob has her.”  The casual tone is almost convincing, but he can’t quite look up from the floor as Chuck grabs his keys and locks the dorm room behind him.  “…we got her most of the way fixed before d—before _Kane_ …told me I had to sell her.  Said I wasn’t _responsible enough_ to have a car any more, that he didn’t think I deserved that kind of freedom or—or something.  So I handed her over to Jacob.”

They get most of the way down the stairs in the silence after that, as Chuck digests this piece of news and Mike buries his hands in his jacket pockets and looks around at the stairwell graffiti.  Chuck pointedly shows no sign of recognition when they pass the _HE SHALL VANQUISH THEE, BARDONIA_ tag scrawled on the second floor, but he sees Mike notice it and glance over at him, grinning.

“…well,” he says finally, when they finally reach the bottom of the stairs.  “That’s okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“It’s okay you don’t have your car.”  Chuck jingles his keys pointedly.  “…we can take mine.”

Mike stares at him like Chuck just admitted to having a third arm.  “Seriously?  Dude, that’s awesome!”

“Hah!  It’s…it’s not _that_ awesome.  I mean, Texas says I drive like a 90-year-old lady.”

“Yeah, well, maybe if everybody drove like that there wouldn’t be accidents anymore.”  For a second Mike’s voice is hard and strange.  Then he shakes his head and shrugs.  “…it’s cool, that’s all I’m sayin’.  You always hated driving.”

“Had to get around somehow.”  It’s a testament to how much the bitter resentment in his chest has eased that he barely even thinks the words _after you ditched me_ on the end of that sentence _._   But maybe Mike hears it anyway, because his eyes dart away from Chuck’s face and his shoulders tense up.  Chuck hurries on.  “—Dutch did my paint-job, it looks way faster than it actually is, but she’s not a racer or anything.”

Honors students get parking spots right at the front of the deck; Mike lets out a delighted peal of laughter as they push through the doors and Chuck’s headlights flash.  “Dude!  It looks so cool!”  He jogs around the car, looking it over, tracing his hands over the golden lightning bolts Dutch painted on the sides.  “Jeez, you’ve got a lot of junk in your trunk though.”

Chuck chokes and then breaks out laughing.  Mike glances up at him and smiles, and either he’s completely guileless or he fakes it really well.  “—what?  Dude, what’s funny?”

“Nothing!”  Chuck kicks the door open.  “Mike, get in the car already.”

The drive to Dutch’s apartment is pretty uneventful.  Mike is twitchy in the car—whether that’s because he sees an accident in every oncoming car or because he can’t believe how slow Chuck drives isn’t completely clear.  By the time they get there, though, it’s obviously something beyond that.  Mike has his arms crossed, one foot tapping very sharply and faster than the beat of the music crackling out of the old car speakers, and he’s got that weird, set look on his face again.  Chuck pulls into the lot outside the apartment, puts the car carefully in park, and then turns in the seat and frowns at Mike.

“…okay, Mikey, what’s up?”

“I can’t go in there.”

God, how much shit had to go down for Mike to be the one saying that?  Chuck hesitates, then swings his legs out of the car and comes around to Mike’s side.  “Come on,” he says, pulls open the door and holds out a hand.  “If you could come back and deal with me, you can handle all of the others.  I’ll bet you five bucks Texas cries.”

Mike laughs a little bit, takes Chuck’s hand and lets himself be pulled out of the car.  He keeps his hands in his pockets as they walk into the building, but as they step into the elevator and start the slow, clunky rise to the fourth floor, Mike’s hand closes around Chuck’s wrist, so tight it almost hurts.  He holds on as they walk out of the elevator and down the hallway, and only holds on tighter when Chuck raises the other hand to knock. 

He’s still holding on when the door swings open.


End file.
